Jun 17, 2011 10:41 GMT  ·  By

Google is rolling out an affiliate program for its eBookstore, enabling anyone that sends buyers to the store to earn a commission. An affiliate program is a fairly regular affair for a bookstore, Amazon already has a solid system in place, so it's good to see that Google has finally caught up.

While Google has announced the availability of the program and explained how bloggers, retailers and anyone else can sign up, it hasn't coughed up the most important detail, what's the cut that these affiliates get.

"Retailers, bloggers, book publishers and other website owners in the U.S. can now become Google eBooks affiliates," Pratip Banerji, Product Manager for Google Books team, announced.

"Affiliates can link to Google eBooks on their sites for any of the hundreds of thousands of titles available for sale, earning a commission for referring sales to the Google eBookstore," he continued.

Google started testing the program as soon as it launched its eBookstore, in December. It has been working with Goodreads since then to iron out the kinks and is now ready for a wider roll out.

"Starting today, we invite all interested site owners to apply to join the expanded Google eBooks affiliate program. Participating sites gain new revenue streams by giving their book-reading audiences an easy way to buy Google eBooks," Google said.

Now, anyone that wants to can get in. However, there are a few steps to take care of before starting to make money by pitching Google ebooks.

Anyone interested has to have a Google AdSense account. This part is easy. Then, they have to join the Google Affiliate Network and get approval here as well. Finally, they can sign-up to be an ebook affiliate.

After that, it's smooth sailing, publishers can either subscribe to the full Google eBooks feed, which gets them access to all of the titles available, or they can use the Google Books APIs to target only the ones that are suitable for their websites.